pseudoscience
8
Gerald N. E. Fern
News
Science is a beach
The first hunt for "the minimal cell" started out as a scientific journey in my friend's back garden, when he lived in Australia near the beach that one time. It is a good beach. It also has many fine bathers and drinks booths. As it is obvious from the above story, we didn't find it, despite his insistence that is was surely at the bottom of another large mojito. But, we looked hard. Damn hard! This initial finding was disappointing as I was fully informed that the minimal cell would be a sure-fire hit to chat up the ladies at the SJIS summer ball, and what's more, being minimal would surely like ambient music.
Means to an end
Since these early experiments, "the minimal cell" has been achieved in its perfect entity. First perfected from M. Genitalum within the venter institute,1 having removed (from an already pathetic cell) most of the genes needed to constitute an excess and affront to life, and then some.2 This yielded M. Labatorium v3.7, also known as "your friendly workhorse of choice" and "a chassis like no other". Initially, it looked for this venture from Venter to be widely useful for the bio-mechanic fervent for something a little less noisy. However, reality soon materialised, and it was found that the organism quickly died when taken out of YAC (Yawningly Awkward Concubine) holding vectors, simply due to a lack of will to go on living. What is more, the organism failed to grow on minimal mediums, despite them sharing a word in the name and in-house "Psy-Jill" assuring us from her crystal ball that it would work. This strain was quickly renamed eMo. Suicidilis and abandoned by the lab in flavour of a new venter.
It has recently come to our attention that we aren't poking enough fun at homeopathy. To remedy this, here is a very brief overivew of homeopathic dilutions.
Succession: diluting a useful substance (such as a drug) in water, to increase the potency of the healing force (via water memory) .
C scale: A series of 1:100 dilutions increases the C number of a homeopathic medicine by 1. 1C=1:100, 2C = 1:10,000 etc.
Arsenic: Safely drinkable at 4C.
10cc: Editor in chiefs favourite 70's group.
12C: Statistically unlikely to caintain one molecule of the original substance.
30C: Standard homeopathic dilution.
40C: 1 atom 'diluted' amongst all the atoms in the universe.
200C: Popular homeopathic flu treatment.
homeopathy
Getting Minimal – Not a hit with the ladies
Figure 1. The splashy splashy nature of finding sea-nomes The graph on the left indicates the optimum level of genome sequencing data obtained in inverse time (s-1) per volume of ocean (metric picolitres3). Gathered genomes are displayed on the right with a heat map comparing genes of over-riding scientific importance compared to the original data sample (also displayed).